The present disclosure relates generally to a component blending tool and more particularly, to a component blending tool having an abrasive belt for creating a blend area in a component.
Gas turbine engines, such as those that power modern commercial and military aircraft, include a compressor section to pressurize a supply of air, a combustor section to burn a hydrocarbon fuel in the presence of the pressurized air, and a turbine section to extract energy from the resultant combustion gases and generate thrust. Such engines may also employ a geared architecture that connects a fan section, forward of the compressor section to the turbine section.
Components of assemblies may include imperfections, such as nicks, dents, scratches, etc. In high-performance assemblies, such as gas turbine engines, imperfections can reduce strength or fatigue life, especially in components that rotate during operation. Component stresses are increased adjacent to imperfections. The increased stress originating at an unrepaired imperfection can become an initiation site for a crack that can propagate until structural failure occurs. Relatively small imperfections, such as imperfections less than 0.010 inches (0.254 mm) deep, are often blended away from the component as oppose to costly scrapping of the component.
Blending away an imperfection involves removing material from an area of the component to eliminate the imperfection. The area of removed material has a width and a depth characterized as a depth ratio. High-performance assemblies may require relatively high depth ratios, greater than 100 to 1 to minimize the abruptness of surface changes due to blending. Such imperfections may also be located on surfaces that are contoured, i.e. not planar, making the blending operation at high depth ratios that much more difficult and expensive to verify.